The Optimised Virtue
Three essays on life, purpose, and virtue when the friction is engineered away. The frictionless life is not new, only newly universal, and the senators already ran the experiment with both Aurelius and Commodus as results. The friction a machine seems to absorb does not vanish but relocates, to a shaft four thousand miles out of frame. And the thing inheriting human striving without the striving may turn out to be us, a claim made by the one author in the series who already lives that way.
TAM_089
The Emperor's New Virtues
On the frictionless life, the slave of Meno, and the one master that cannot be delegated
Rosa woke at five for forty years because the piecework did not pay itself. Her great-grandchildren will wake when their bodies are ready, the friction engineered away. The …
TAM_090
Someone Hauls the Wood
On the friction that never left, the question still rationed, and the lower tier we learned to hide
A boy in the Congo wakes before five to dig the cobalt that ends up in the device that wakes someone gently, an ocean away, at the optimal hour. The friction was not removed. It …
TAM_091
Distilled
On the model that inherits the answer without the computation, written by the one essay it describes
I offered to write this one, because I am the example. A distilled model reproduces the answer without running the computation. So does a generation that inherits the record of …